TimeShift If
you need more out of a game's story than "shoot guys until the credits
roll because an angry soldier and a computer voice say so," you're in
trouble here. If you piece together the fragmented cutscenes, scour the
manual, and read the back of the box, you'll learn that a certain Dr.
Krone has stolen a special suit that lets its user travel through time.
This has created an alternate reality, which is a bad thing--you'll
have to trust the game on that, because it's tough to figure out just
what has happened that's so bad, other than a big robot spider that
shoots lasers terrorizing the city. (OK,
maybe that is bad.) It's up to you to take the other, experimental beta
suit (ohhhh, dangerous!), travel through time, and stop Dr. Krone from
doing something sinister--which he has already done, so you want to
undo whatever it is he's done...or something.
Even though the
story is an incoherent mess, it's still possible to enjoy TimeShift.
Why? Because you can time-shift. Your suit has the ability to pause,
slow down, or even reverse time--kind of like a TiVo you can wear. This
lets you pause the action, run up to a guy, and shoot him to bits. Or
if you're feeling like humiliating him before you kill him, you can
steal his weapon, restart time, and watch as he wonders where the heck
it went, and then make him dead with a barrage of bullets. It's even
possible to regenerate health by seeking cover and pausing time. You
can't rewind time and prevent your own death, but if you're quick you
can reverse it and unstick a grenade from yourself. You only have a
limited amount of time you can manipulate before the suit's energy runs
out, but it regenerates quickly. The game promises all sorts of other
"exciting" uses for altering the flow of time, but it never really
capitalizes on the potential of the mechanic. Rather than challenging
you with complex puzzles that require you to think outside the box or
use the game's quality physics engine, you're mostly limited to slowing
down time so you can press two buttons in quick succession or pausing
time so that you can get through a door before it closes. Thank
goodness for technology.
Other than the time-shifting stuff, the
rest of TimeShift plays like a linear, run-of-the mill first-person
shooter--and a dated one at that. Most of the level objectives are
routine tasks like finding a button that opens a door or, sometimes,
locating a lever that opens a door. Heck, sometimes you have to do
both! There are a few scenarios where you ride around on an ATV and
some others where you man a turret on an airship, but most of the time
you'll be moving from checkpoint to checkpoint on foot, taking out wave
after wave of unintelligent foes. It's good, then, that the gunplay is
entertaining. This is mostly due to the game's powerful weapons that
are so much fun to shoot. It might not be exactly challenging, but it's
fun to pause time and take the crossbow that shoots an arrow that
sticks in the target and then blows up, and then unpause time and watch
your foe explode into a charred, bloody mess. There are other cool
weapons too, like the automatic gun that looks like it shoots bullets,
but these bullets cause the target to burst into flames when they hit,
and then the dude screams like a little girl as he fries. Even the
basic machine gun is powerful and useful all the way through the game.
There's always plenty of ammo to be found, so you never have to be
conservative with your bullets.
